daho.am 2016: Where The Munich Tech Community Comes Together

For the third year running, Stylight brought the Munich developer community together for daho.am; a whole day dedicated to learning, networking and overall, just having fun with 8 different speakers, 7 workshops and almost 400 attendees.

Now, the first question that may come to your mind is – ‘why does a fashion company organise a developer conference?’ Before anything, it’s best to know that Stylight is a tech company. Organising an event such as daho.am is the culmination point of our passion for being part of and help building the local tech community, growing our network, and of course, celebrating engineering.

That’s why we like to see Stylight as a place where the tech community can gather, exchange knowledge and build new connections. And speaking of knowledge, here are the top 8 learnings (trust us it was hard to decide) we took away from our amazing speakers at this year’s event, and, as they say a picture is worth a thousands words, make sure you check out the illustration drawn in real-time during the talks, by our infamous Head of Mobile Apps, Michael Ludwig.

1. Seth Vargo, Hashicorp talked about encryption and best security practices, which, in light of the numerous data breaches we see in news these days, is something developers need to pay a particular attention to. Learning: Don’t put password and sensitive information in text files, use Vault instead!

2. Stylight’s very own Claudia Guevara talked about how Stylight is breaking the monolith and embracing micro services. Learning: It’s not all rainbows and unicorns for sure, but getting the software closer to the way we are organised as a team is key in going faster and being more resilient.

3. Florent Crivello provided very interesting insights into Uber, and how to operate in high-growth, high-speed company. Learning: “Speed is achieved not only by moving faster but by removing the things that slow you down, and being fierce”.

4. Gavin Wood, co-founder of Ethereum and Ethcore talked about Blockchain, a technology that is present every other day in the news. Learning: Ethereum can be seen as a single computer, but with unique properties; it’s impossible to bring down, has no single point of control or failure and is resistant to censorship.

5. Project Tango, presented by Simon Lynen, was the WOW session of #dahoam16. Simon demonstrated the advances of Google in Augmented Reality, and showed us the latest advances in a device packed with sensors, which between other things, brought dinosaurs to life on stage! Learning: Augmented Reality is coming to a phone near you and sooner than you’d expect!

6. Director of Machine Learning at Amazon, Ralf Herbrich, provided us with a fascinating bit of history on the field. Learning: Amazon uses Machine Learning literally everywhere, from inspecting bins to helping employees to detecting rotten perishable products that need to be discarded.

7. Igor Maravic, Spotify, a company we very much like, talked about the challenges of managing billions of data events every day. Learning: Using Google Cloud Platform works better than using a custom solution.

8. Mustafa Isik, Bayerische Rundfunk gave a talk – which surprised many people – on how an old broadcaster can also be a leading force in media innovation. Learning: You can delivers as much innovation as a startup, run on a very modern software stack, and organise hackathons to foster new ideas – even if you’re part of an old organization.

For our hands-on attendees, we delivered 7 invaluable workshops, listing names such as CoreOS, Intel, Docker, AWS and ThoughtWorks as participants. Our workshops were packed full of developers hacking away on technologies ranging from IoT to programmable infrastructures.

The event was also used to experiment on a few new things. A digital certificate on the blockchain developed by Johann, Stylight’s Tech Evangelist, will be rolled out to attendees who require one. And a chat bot, developed by Johannes Kliengebiel – a student in media communication science – answered attendees’ questions throughout the conference.

Of course, daho.am would not be daho.am if it didn’t come complete with a bit of Bavarian flair. The traditional weisswurst breakfast went down a treat with our attendees, and the biergarten after party also proved a hit.

Want to know more? As we’re a very data-driven company, we just couldn’t do anything less than provide an infographic with our developer conference in numbers: